'THE BROTHERS'

If your idea of staying abreast of the trials of the young, upwardly mobile black men in the fiction of E. Lynn Harris, Michael Baisden or Eric Jerome Dickey is waiting for the movie version, then "The Brothers" might be your cue to exhale.

Written and directed by neophyte Gary Hardwick, "The Brothers" seems to be ripped from the pages of titles such as "Men Cry in the Dark" and "Cheaters" and stitched together into an episodic tribute to paperback soap operas.

A quartet of yuppies (Morris Chestnut, Bill Bellamy, D.L. Hughley, Shemar Moore) embarks on variations of the same sexual crisis -- commitment. It's a fear older than old-school, and Hardwick has no particular insight into the problem, just a lot of delightfully filthy exchanges that seem as though they have fallen out of Terry McMillan's Gucci bag.

Each bit of unsolicited advice smacks of that ticked-off, self-aggrandized talk-show audience member making a grab for Montel Williams' microphone. And so time with "The Brothers" is less like watching a movie than it is like being accosted by one. Still, if anyone is going to preach in the church of commitment, by Oprah, let it be Jenifer Lewis!

She plays Chestnut's achy-breaky sex kitten of a mother, and she may as well be ordained in matters of the loins. Lewis, who played William H. Macy's exasperated spouse in "Mystery Men," doesn't simply ignite this movie, she funks it up, shoplifting it as if by force of habit. The curious thing about "The Brothers" is how for-the-sisters it is. Aside from Chestnut, the women do all the best work -- from Lewis and Marla Gibbs to "Bring It On's" Gabrielle Union, Tamala Jones ("The Wood") and Tatyana Ali, who spearheads the most uproariously vulgar confab. They're hip to all the sermons -- almost until the movie seems to be preaching to its own choir.

David Maquiling's first feature, "Too Much Sleep," has the low-budget look of "My First Indie," but the film also draws the fine line between art-house quirk and artistic idiosyncrasy.

The title hints at the drowsy surrealism in Maquiling's filmmaking: all sleep, little dream. His protagonist is Jack (Marc Palmieri), a slacking man- boy who appears to be sleeping his life away -- crammed in the twin bed of his youth. His introduction comes during a neighborhood stroll so lethargic he may as well be sleepwalking.

On a bus one afternoon, the paper bag with his lunch and his dead father's unlicensed revolver is swiped in a scam pulled by a mother-daughter team. He spends the movie chasing workaday suspects trying to get it back, following leads that take him from step aerobics to a gay strip club. The low-key search becomes a proving ground for Jack's drowsily arrested development, spurred on by a visit to Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta), the former crook who's some retirement- age Sancho Panza.

As the gun's status graduates from the concrete, felonious "stolen" to the more metaphysical "missing," the film moves from mere dreamlessness to its own weird magic. Maquiling fuses the loner-driven, vagary-obsessed fiction of Kafka and Schnitzler into an earthbound piece of suburban New Jersey diner-to- lawn domestica. The movie is as modestly unpretentious as David O. Russell's "Spanking the Monkey."

Martin Scorsese tried something not altogether different with "After Hours. " But Scorsese was interested in (surprise) the violent glee of keeping Griffin Dunne on a Freudian pulley for one night. Maquiling is a less bruising showoff: He just wants to airbrush time.